


Jump In to Start

by writerdot



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Gen, M/M, Sick!Wilson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 13:43:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdot/pseuds/writerdot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilson is caught in an explosion at a supermarket...House must find him before it's too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jump In to Start

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for the Sick!Wilson fest (Round 7) on Livejournal. Beta read by the lovely Damigella_314.

**Jump In to Start: 1**

“Pizza.”

“Okay.”

“Beer.”

“Uh huh.”

“Fried pickles on a stick.”

House can practically see the expression on Wilson’s face over the phone line. “That’s disgusting.”

“You had your ‘I’m tuning you out’ voice on. Just checking to make sure you were really listening.”

Wilson snorts and House can’t help a grin. “I do not have a…okay, fine. But this is the second time you’ve called me since I left you at the hospital. It’s not like I don’t know what to get.”

“Yeah well, maybe I’m afraid that you’re going to get some stupid food that you’re going to pass off as something else to get me back for ditching you for the fight.”

“Right. You keep waiting for that retaliation,” Wilson retorts.

He’s not about to tell Wilson that he’s been doing exactly that. Looking at his watch, then back into the adjoining conference room to make sure that his team hasn’t returned, he says, “Seems the patient is still alive. No news is good news and all that. I’ll sneak out now, should beat you back to my place.”

 “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I pick up the pizza. Assuming you’ll actually be there.”

“Well, I did have a better offer coming from…oh, wait.”

“Well, I’m glad that I’ve managed to stay so high on your priority list…this week anyway.”

“As high on mine as I am on yours.”

“Oh, well, damn. Wish you’d told me that before.”

“Thought it was pretty evident," House retorts, glad Wilson can’t see the ridiculous grin on his face. “Oh hey, what did I decide we were going to watch anyway?”

“I think it was something about drinking a couple of beers and then deciding.”

“Right. Drunk movie picking.”

“Good old fashioned past-time,” Wilson answers with a chuckle, which seems farther away for a second. “Damn, my stupid phone is dying. I’ll just see you in a bit.”

House hangs up and chuckles to himself. He supposes that if Wilson were going to escalate the little prank war that he’d inadvertently started by trying to leave him behind in the first place, then he probably would have done it already. Especially since House has spent the last week watching everything he eats or drinks, and stepping into his apartment cautiously…

And that’s when he gets it. He’s torn between cursing himself and laughing out loud, because right now, it feels as though they’ve both forgotten they have issues and he’s hoping that it’s just not wishful thinking that they’re getting back to where they used to be, on even ground. Or starting to, anyway. Maybe his plan is working, after all.

He calls himself an idiot for not seeing this sooner and presses redial on his phone.

 “Figure it out?”

Damn Wilson and his damned grin that House can practically hear over the phone line. “You bastard.”

“Took you long enough,” Wilson says amusedly. “Though, I’ve got to admit that watching you make Taub sip your coffee before you would even touch it was a fun to watch.”

“You realize I have to get you back,” House responds, already thinking up things to do. He’s wondering if he should sacrifice the TV he’d put on that wall between their offices and make it impossible to close.

“Yeah, yeah,” Wilson says, interrupting his train of thought and House can hear that stupid grin again. Look, I’ve got everything-" House can hear the tell-tale jingle of car keys now “And I’m-“

But he never hears the end of Wilson’s sentence. The words are drowned up by a sound he can’t believe he’s hearing and he has to pull the phone away from his ear, bending over as the sound reverberates over the phone line.

He gets his bearings back less than a second later, when the roaring sound ends just as suddenly as it had begun and presses the phone to his ear so hard, he’s sure he’s leaving an imprint.

“Wilson!”

“Here,” Wilson gasps with a cough. “Oh my God, House.”

“Are you okay?”

“Oh god, I think it …House, I think it was an explosion.”

“I figured that much. Are. You. Okay.” House demands.

“Um…” Another cough. “I—I think so. I hit my head on my car…there’s so much smoke.”

“Wilson, listen to me,” he’s already standing, halfway to the door. “Stay on the line with me, all right?”

“House, there are people in there.”

House lets the door slam behind him, already knowing exactly what Wilson is thinking of doing. “Don’t you dare go back in there. Stay on the line.”

Wilson coughs again, hard. “Okay.”

House nods, though Wilson can’t see him. “Get as far away as you can.”

“I am.”

He’s just pressed the down button on the elevator when it opens in front of him, and Foreman steps out.

“House,” he says. “You aren’t answering your pages. I need you down in the ER, there was a gas explosion at a grocery store in-“

“I know,” House interrupts. “Wilson’s there.”

Foreman looks at him, his expression clearly saying that that comment wasn’t funny. “Are you sure?”

House gestures impatiently to the phone attached to his ear. “Unless two grocery stores have blown up tonight, I’m guessing it’s a safe bet that the one that Wilson’s in front of right now is the one you might be referring to. I need to go.”

“House-“

House shakes his head and cuts Foreman off again. “Wilson, listen to me. Stay as far away as you can, but do not drive. If you hit your head hard enough, you could have a concussion.”

He expects a quick answer, something like ‘Yes, House I _am_ a doctor,’ in that voice of endless exasperation that Wilson’s perfected over the years, but he doesn’t get any kind of response.

“Wilson!”

House brings the phone away from his ear and instead of the screen showing a phone call in progress, it simply shows the home-screen instead. He’s lost the connection.

“Damn it,” he says sharply. “I need to get over there.” He presses the down button for the elevator again.

 “House.” Foreman blocks his way to the elevator when the doors open. “Listen to me. You go and you will be arrested. Never mind that the debris that is sure to be around that area could do you damage, too. What good will that do Wilson?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that,” House gripes, already moving to another elevator.

Foreman decides not to mention how well that went. “They will find him. You getting tossed in a cell will probably insure that, when they do, you’ll be able to do nothing for him.”

House’s body language radiates indecision and he glances around, gripping his cane in his palm hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “He mentioned the other people in the store. I can guarantee you that he went in after them. I didn’t just happen to lose the signal; he hung up on me.”

“If he did…they’ll find him.”

House says nothing in response, but looks between the elevator and Foreman.

Foreman begins to steer him back toward his office. “Come on. I’ll make some calls.”

And so House paces his office without his cane, making slow painful circuits around the space, barely noticing the pain in his thigh. He can’t stop thinking about the course of his relationship with Wilson. The good times, the difficult ones…the one-step-forward-two-steps-back, awkward journey to what they used to be before House changed everyone’s lives in a haze of booze and Vicodin use.

After putting their own ER on alert, Foreman calls over to Princeton General, getting Wilson’s description to them. When this task is done, he stays in the office and House knows that Foreman’s continued presence is because he knows House will bolt after Wilson if the dean so much as looks the other way. He watches House move around, watches him think and House doesn’t much notice that either.

But he certainly notices when the loud, sudden, shrill ring of Foreman’s cell phone breaks the tense silence. Foreman answers it quickly.

A few short okays and yesses and House stares impatiently. When Foreman says, “Keep me informed if anything changes. Call me the second you know more,” he feels like he’s going to jump out of his own skin.

He hangs up and looks at House. “There was a guy,” he explains,” they found him a short while ago, just inside the building…buried under the rubble. He matches Wilson’s description…House, the man is just barely alive. They’re bringing him in now.”

Foreman has barely finished that sentence before House is moving toward the door of the office, making his way toward the elevator in such a flurry of motion that every person that isn’t helping in the ER clears a path for fear of becoming a casualty.

A moment or two later, House is cursing the elevator’s slow descent when Foreman’s phone rings again.

“What?” House demands as Foreman hangs up.

“The ambulance is just pulling up… the guy’s just been pronounced DOA.”

All of the air leaves him, and he can’t see straight. Shaking his head violently, he tells himself that he doesn’t know…they don’t know for sure that it’s….

“It isn’t him,” he decides, because the alternative is unfathomable. “It’s not.”

“House-“

The doors open, finally, and House charges out, as fast as is possible, toward his intended destination. He gets there just as the ambulance doors open and an EMT climbs out and reaches to grab the end of the stretcher.

“Male, undefinable age…DOA…cause…”

But House tunes out the EMT, pushes his hand out of the way and ignores the angry ‘Hey!’ as he pulls himself into the ambulance, adrenaline and worry and panic all warring in his mind as the gets closer to the still form on the stretcher.

He sees the face, exhales shakily and yells out:

“I told you. It’s not him!”

House turns carefully and slowly climbs out, looking at Foreman. “It’s not him.”

Foreman nods decisively. “Okay. So…”

But before Foreman can finish that sentence, House’s phone rings this time. He doesn’t even look at the screen before he answers it.

“Wilson?”

“This is regarding James Wilson,” an unfamiliar voice answers.

House goes still, the worst case scenario rushing through his mind…because if Wilson’s not calling House himself, then… “You recognized him from the description we relayed to you?”

“I know nothing about a description, but he’s conscious and asked me to call you and tell you that he’s at Princeton General hospital. He’s currently undergoing a chest CT for smoke inhalation, which is why he hasn’t called you himself. He wanted me to tell you up front that he’s fine and not to break any laws to get here.”

She sounds mildly confused at that last part, but House doesn’t care.

“Thanks,” House hangs up abruptly and looks Foreman. “Princeton General. Get me over there.”

 Foreman, with the air of someone who had been expecting that, pulls out his own phone to make the necessary call.

*****

House wonders, as he stands in front of the door to Wilson’s hospital room an agonizing hour later, how Foreman had been so easily able to persuade his parole officer to let him go to a fight in Atlantic City, but it was like pulling teeth to get clearance to go to another hospital to visit his best friend.

When he’d gotten here, he’d tuned out Foreman’s conversation with the doctor who’d lead them here with the intention of going in to see for himself, read the chart, and make sure that Wilson’s alive and whole before his own eyes. But he’d gotten to the doorway, seen Wilson’s bruised forehead in the small window, mouth and nose covered with an oxygen mask and he’d stopped.

This is not a Wilson that he’s familiar with. Drunk Wilson, yes. Sick with a cold Wilson, okay. In a hospital bed after that living donor operation, fine.

But seeing him after he very nearly died? No.

“According to Jameson-” Foreman’s voice breaks into his thoughts. He’s standing beside him now, having apparently finished getting the details. “-the paramedics said that he’d been standing with a group of people that had already been outside when the explosion occurred. Other patrons who had been coming in or leaving, trying to make sure they were okay.”

“But, he didn’t go back in.”

“No,” Foreman answers. “It appears he didn’t.”

House releases a small, relieved breath at that, but says nothing in response.

 Foreman continues: “His injuries include smoke inhalation, and the bruise on his head and some lacerations to the back of his neck, probably from flying debris. It’s likely his heavy winter coat saved him from the worse of that. The chest CT they did shows the oxygen is helping clear up the smoke, but they plan to do a bronchoscopy to help it along.”

“Concussion? He said on the phone that he’d hit his head on the car.”

“Apparently he didn’t hit it hard enough…he was beginning to get a little disoriented from the smoke inhalation, but no concussion.”

House nods. “How did he end up here instead of our hospital?”

“The attending on call, Erichson, let them know we were over capacity with patients from the explosion, just before we got to the ambulance bay. They diverted three non-critical patients over here. Our description was recognized after he had you contacted.”

House’s gaze drifts back to Wilson’s face through the glass window again.

“You realize that with your parole, you cannot and will not have any privileges here. You’re family, that’s it.”

“I get it,” House snaps, but it’s half-hearted at best.

“I’ll wait out here,” Foreman prompts, waving a hand at the door. House shoots him a glare before he reaches out, grabs the door handle and slips inside.

Wilson stirs and opens his eyes, blinking a little groggily. When his friend sees him, he smiles gently and rasps, “Hey.”

House walks toward the bed, looking Wilson over from head to toe and he can see the small bandages peeking out from the back of Wilson’s neck. He’s not sure what exactly to do now that he’s here. And he doesn’t like this feeling. “Hey.”

There’s a short, awkward silence before Wilson is pulling the mask away and rasping, “House,” but before he can say more, he begins to cough.

“Put that back on,” House says, “And breathe.”

“But—“

Another coughing fit and House reaches over and replaces the mask himself. With a hoarse sigh, Wilson gives in and settles back down. Pulling a chair toward the bed, House sits down, grips his cane between his open palms and rolls it, finding just a little comfort in the gesture as they sit in silence.

The room is devoid of any conversation until the door opens and a nurse pokes her head in. “Time for your bronchoscopy.”

Wilson nods and she glances at House in confusion.

“He’s coming with,” Wilson says firmly, with a glance at House that clearly says ‘what’s going on with you?’

The nurse looks between them and House shrugs in agreement. With a small shake of her head, she begins the necessary detachments from the machinery and a few minutes later, House is following them down a long hallway.

*****

The silence when they return to the room is awkward again. House abhors the feeling and not for the first time, lately.

“I didn’t go back in.”

House looks at Wilson, caught off guard by the sudden announcement.

House blinks. “What?”

“Why you’re acting so…weird,” Wilson answers, fidgeting with an invisible thread on the blanket covering him. He sounds better than he had before; the mixture of the oxygen and the bronchoscopy have done what they’re supposed to and he’s been switched to using a nasal cannula. “Are you pissed because you think I went back in?”

“I know you didn’t,” House admits. “The paramedics told the ER doc. Why didn’t you?”

Wilson sighs. “After I…hung up on you… I was going to try and slip past the firefighters. You don’t have to tell me how stupid that was. Especially since now that I think back on it, there were so many of them that…”

“Wilson.”

Wilson slows down and continues, “I took one step…and heard your voice in my head, your worried, impatient voice, telling me to stay on the line and I couldn’t do it. So I looked down at my phone ready to call you back and say the call dropped or something, I don’t know…”

Here, Wilson pauses to chuckle a little breathlessly. “I looked at the screen and discovered that the damn thing had died on me.”

And House remembers, now, Wilson’s comment at the store about his phone dying. He shakes his head. “You should just start carrying that charger around with you,” he says.

Wilson tilts his head to the side in agreement. “I will. Then I looked up and saw all of the other people that hadn’t been inside and I decided to try to help them, instead.”

“A better alternative,” House concedes, because that’s still the Wilson he knows.

“Yeah.” Wilson looks at him strangely. “So…wait…if that’s not why you’re not acting like you, then what is the reason?”

“I don’t have privileges here,” House evades.

“I know that,” Wilson says impatiently, coughing a little. “But you still would have demanded that you be allowed to go with for the bronchoscopy.”

House narrows his eyes at him. “You wanted me to.”

“Of course I did,” Wilson answers with exasperation. “I said that, didn’t I?”

House’s gaze moves to his fingers fidgeting with his cane. “I guess…it’s because we haven’t gotten much deeper than pranking each other since I came back.”

Wilson deflates and lies back on the bed. “I know. I just…”

Wilson trails off, but House understands and feels a little better that Wilson seems to be feeling this, too. He remembers that vulnerable moment after he’d told Wilson he liked him, how it had felt when Wilson had told him he didn’t reciprocate and that even though he rationally knows that Wilson was lying, that whole thing has, naturally, gone un-discussed.

Then there was that awkward dinner after Wilson had punched him. House remembers thinking that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be…it wasn’t how it used to be and he’d vowed to try to get that back. His plan of using pranks, like what they used to do, to try and get their old friendship to return hasn’t been working as well as he’d thought it would.

And Wilson could have died tonight and now House is beginning to think he should stop trying to delude himself that the superficial lightness reappearing back in their friendship is going to be enough. There always used to be that deeper undercurrent to their relationship…and House hasn’t felt that for a long time.

“The thing is, House,” Wilson continues when House doesn’t say anything, lost in thought as he is. “I know things have been weird, we’ve both been trying to find some semblance of normalcy. But after all this time and everything we’ve been through, I’m not going anywhere. I realized that after I hung up and didn’t want to take that risk.”

House looks at the cane dangling over his wrist. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

He hears Wilson take a deep breath, and he looks at the other man sharply, afraid that he might be having difficulty breathing again. But Wilson is just looking at him gently and House decides, then and there, that it’s time to stop pretending.

On more than one level.

“Me too,” Wilson murmurs. House can’t quite read the expression on Wilson’s face and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, Wilson might be ready to stop pretending, too.

“We’ve spent so much time…” Wilson says, softly. “…not talking about the things that matter.”

“I know,” House answers with a short nod and as if on their own volition, his fingers have moved to rest on the bed, right next to Wilson’s wrist. He can just barely feel the plastic of the hospital wrist band and his eyes drift down to that, he makes that his focal point, because with what he’s about to say, he finds it easier than looking at Wilson’s face.

“Maybe we should start. Talking about…stuff, I mean,” he says quietly.

And when, a second later, Wilson readjusts his hand so their fingers intertwine, House feels relief, and for the first time in a long time, hope.

He finally looks up and meets Wilson’s eyes, and sees the gentle, affectionate smile.

Wilson squeezes his fingers, and says in a firm, but still just a little hoarse, voice, “I’m ready when you are.”

END


End file.
